Background

A wide array of existing instruments are commonly used to assess childhood behavior and development for the evaluation of social, emotional and behavioral disorders such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and anxiety. Many of these instruments either focus on one diagnostic category or encompass a broad set of childhood behaviors. We analyze a wide range of standardized behavioral instruments and identify a comprehensive, structured semantic hierarchical grouping of child behavioral observational features. We use the hierarchy to create Rosetta: a new set of behavioral assessment questions, designed to be minimal yet comprehensive in its coverage of clinically relevant behaviors. We maintain a full mapping from every functional feature in every covered instrument to a corresponding question in Rosetta.

Results

In all, 209 Rosetta questions are shown to cover all the behavioral concepts targeted in the eight existing standardized instruments.

Conclusion

The resulting hierarchy can be used to create more concise instruments across various ages and conditions, as well as create more robust overlapping datasets for both clinical and research use.